I say the Zero Reply Threads that are over 1 year old should be deleted because the people who asked the questions obviously have gotten the answer elsewhere, have stopped using Linux or gave up waiting for the answer to come from anyone here.

The stats that show this site has X users and X posts become irrelevant if thousands of posts are unanswered and those asking the questions can not answer our questions if they need to try something we suggest or need to supply more information to us the persons answering their queries. Then they might have forgotten their passwd's and their isp where their email was went under and so on...

I realize that valuble information such as error messages and configurations are contained on all of those 'obsolete' posts but they don't make people who are trying to make the over 1063 pages of unanswered threads go down. Maybe that stuff can be siphoned out someone have and a list created of what fix tutorials we should write to eliviate the constant questions that are the same year after year....

Locking the threads seem to be a waste of time as well. And then there are all the posts about upgrades to this site that just make the list larger and they don't seem to be going away which is another story entirely.

I think only stuff from users and not people from the management and regulation teams of LQ should reside in the Zero Reply Thread.

Just as I've suggested before. All NEWS should be locked out of the Zero Reply Thread despite what kind of fealings management has for the "news" or "changes made" threads, they are and will always be something that will inflate and skew the actual unsolved questions count, etc.

So now you, the LQ management team, must decide which is best for LQ.org. BIG Stats of many posts that include thousands of unanswered/unresolved/and/never/will/be or a reduced stats count and a fresh outlook at the real issues since the old ones have resolved on other sites years ago or with a new release of *.

Just a suggestion. Delete the outdated threads or have them there forever and be known as a site where it's a percentage that you get a response based on the past record from their Zero Reply Thread link.....

acid_kewpie

04-03-2005 05:17 AM

I can totally see where you're coming from here, but really can't see it being beneficial to LQ.org. As you've already said, many posts do not require replies. people post tips, hints, thanks etc... LQ is not short of diskspace... they aren't doing any harm... In a similar vein accounts with no posts ever are also not deleted. many people appear to like having an LQ account incase they want to post, and reguarly browse the site logged in, but do not feel the need to post. What about the threads that were replied to, but never had a satisfactory answer? there's always exceptions that maybe also could be deleted... doesn't benefit anyone though really.

again the focus of the zero replies drive is not to reduce an arbitrary statistic, but to improve the quality of service LQ provides. We're just more interested in actually being as good as possible rather than deleting stuff that doesn't suit... we're not politicians, we're honest!

jeremy

04-03-2005 10:00 AM

Chris is correct. I'll add a couple comments myself. One of the great things about LQ is that we keep a complete history. Arbitrarily removing threads to save pennies on disk space just doesn't fit into the spirit of what the site is about. Some threads with 0 replies contain extremely good information and removing those from the search would be a real shame. As far as the stats go, we're not after huge stats and never have been - it's not like we get paid per post or per user ;) We do regularly remove users that have 0 posts and haven't visited in a while, but that came about more as a courtesy for people desiring usernames than anything else.